Comments by "Average Alien" (@AverageAlien) on "Whatifalthist"
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@Anna-1917 I'm just a right winger. I don't believe in the political compass. I think it's completely incorrect. I think the best model that describes reality accurately is a simple left to right spectrum. 100% socialism is far left, 100% capitalism is far right. Let's say I'm 85% on the right. I believe some state is necessary, because the state is inevitable.
Here are the definitions I have found for these words.
State: A group or community with similar political goals or beliefs
Socialism: State ownership of the means of production
Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production.
Private means individual or family level. This is why corporations cannot be capitalist. Capitalism is the consensual trade of goods and services between private individuals. There is no state involved here, no cartel demanding you "share" your property or wealth with them at gunpoint. It's just you and me. You want to buy my epic Pizzas, so you use some form of money to exchange with me. Notice how I said money and not currency. Currency is not money. Money is a commodity, something that we can both agree has a real value, like gold and silver, or copper etc etc. Even Marx agrees with this definition of money and that capitalism cannot occur without it. But we don't use gold, or silver, or copper, or chickens to pay for things do we? We use worthless paper and digital numbers. Their value can change on a whim, if some state authority figure says so. Central banks are socialist. Currency is socialist. It allows the state to have a monopoly on wealth itself. It was a gradual process, but we lost our gold and ended up with some worthless paper in its stead. This is not capitalism, unfortunately.
But let's pretend the worthless paper has some kind of intrinsic value. You buy my pizza. You love the pizza so much, that you tell your friends about it. Eventually, demand for my pizza goes up. This is evident by the fact that I am profiting from my pizzas. Profit is good. Profit means demand. So I reinvest that profit into my pizza shop, maybe buy a few more ovens, and ask someone else to help me out for an agreed amount of hours and an agreed upon salary. Now I can produce more pizzas and meet the higher demand. I buy a some new machinery, which helps prepare pizzas in 50% less time. I can see that this is more efficient and helps me produce more pizza because of the larger profit. But there is a problem. A rival has set up his own pizza shop, and is stealing some of my customers. So demand for my pizza drops, and so does profit. But I can lower my prices by 20% and still have enough to reinvest into the business. So I do just that. And wow, like magic, customers flood back, demand returns.
This is why capitalism always, without fail, leads to lower and lower prices, higher and higher efficiency, more goods, higher quality, and more jobs. Capitalism is fantastic. So what went wrong? Well, you see, this big greedy old cartel, called the central state, decided that it wanted a slice of my pizza pie profits. But this big greedy cartel didn't want to do any work itself. So what does it do? It kicks down my pizza shop door, barges in with armed thugs, and demands that I pay them protection money, 20% of my profits should go to them. Now, my rival, the other pizza shop is growing bigger and bigger. They've got 100s of workers and a small chain of restaurants. But because of their large, bloated operation, they have become inefficient, and their quality and prices have stagnated. Before the state stole 20% of my profits, I could undercut them by such a large margin, that I basically gave pizzas away for free (based on a true story from the 1800s, a steam boat corporation was undercut by a small company by such a large degree, that it was practically selling tickets for nothing). The state sees that my rival is being undercut, and hatches a plan. Why bother trying to control 1000s of small pizza shops, when they could just control one massive pizza shop? So they begin to invest the money they stole from my pizza shop into the other pizza shop. Now this is clearly cheating, because they didn't earn that money through profit due to efficiency, but they effectively stole it from my business. But not even this stolen money being pumped into their operation is enough. So the state hatches another plan. They create a new mandatory minimum wage, and make it so ridiculously high that it will cripple all but the largest of businesses. This, combined with the stolen money they're pumping into the rival pizza shop, allows them to grow larger and larger. On top of this, they set maximum product prices, so I can't raise my prices to maintain the operation. I have to shut my doors, and give up, as the massive pizza corporation rises to the top, a big, bloated corpse, propped up with stolen money from individuals, and kept in power through regulation that harms the little guy. The pizza corporation now has an elected president, like the central state, and a state hierarchy has formed, a pyramid of sorts. It's no longer the owner and workers, it's the president, vice president, and the 50 other levels of the pyramid beneath them. Since they are now a state, profits are non existent or meaningless. Just like the central state, it cannot calculate profits, so it cannot calculate the value of anything anymore. You need profits to calculate value. Demand means you need to raise prices, low demand means you need to lower them. This is why pure socialism always leads to mass starvation. The state simply cannot calculate the value of anything. The value of labour cannot be calculated, it doesn't know what is efficient and what isn't, how much bread to produce, where to produce is, where the demand is, where to supply. It cannot know these things without profit, and it cannot create profit because it runs on stolen wealth and property.
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